Whether someone is looking for a restaurant for their date night or buying software for their company, the opinions of people who’ve made the same decision before them matter.
Reviews are basically the digital version of word-of-mouth marketing that’s now happening on a global scale. They are the final push that turns a potential customer into a paying one.
According to a study done by Spiegel, around 95% of customers read reviews before making a purchasing decision. And a whopping 72% of customers don’t take any action until they’ve read reviews of the product/service.
Collecting B2B Customer Reviews
For the B2B space, we might think that reviews don’t matter as much and it’s all about the sales, support, and quality of the product. Then we are partially right. Yes, sales, support, and product matter but so do reviews. 92% of B2B customers are more likely to purchase after reading a trusted & authentic review.
According to BrightLocal, customers require businesses to have at least 40 reviews for them to believe in the average star rating. So if you have less than 40 reviews for your products or software, then it’s time to get to work.
For this particular article, we will be focusing on the methods or ways to collect reviews for a B2B company but feel free to read the article even if you run a D2C or an eCommerce business. The inspiration can strike anywhere, any place, and any article.
Without further ado, let’s get straight to the ways you can collect reviews from your B2B customers to improve your brand’s reputation and better your conversion rates.
Onboard – Nurture – Review
Create email and in-app journies for your new customers with an aim to nurture them and successfully onboard them with your product. Add all the necessary resources to this communication to set your customers up for success.
Pro Tip: Use robust and scalable email marketing software to create such customer journeys. This would eliminate any redundant work and human error from the process and automate the entire flow for maximum outcome.
At the second last or last stage of the journey when your customers are happy and satisfied with your onboarding process and it’s been at least a few months, ask them to share their onboarding experience with you or leave a review of the product.
The chances of them sharing feedback or leaving reviews for your product at that stage are quite high since they were provided all the necessary support and communicated frequently in case of any obstacles.
Happy customers are always ready to cooperate and love sharing their experiences and feedback.
Social media platforms
This isn’t a lesser-known way to collect reviews but it is a must mention. Social Media platforms are social which means they are open for everyone to see and engage with. The more your audience engages with your social media accounts, the better your brand’s social reputation.
For B2B companies, LinkedIn and Twitter are the best platforms to engage with the target audience and collect reviews during the said engagement. You can also promote your reviews on Twitter to attract your audience or while engaging with your customers, leave a link to your review page.
Contests and quizzes
Contests and quizzes are quick ways to engage with your audience. You can also use them to achieve certain goals like sign-ups, getting more followers, sales, etc.
If we think a little out of the box, you can also collect reviews using these engagement activities.
You can hold a contest where your customers will have to share their experience or leave a review of your product to enter and in return, you offer some incentives.
Make sure to be creative with your offering and it should add value to their business then you can expect some success from the contest.
Incentivise customers & employees
To make things simpler, you can always offer incentives directly to your customers in exchange for reviews.
Offer a gift card to their favourite e-commerce store, a subscription to a podcast service or a newsletter of their interest, a discount on your plans, a free add-on service, etc.
This is recommended for companies that have separate budgets allocated for such activities.
Apart from offering incentives to customers, you can offer incentives to your employees as well and link them to the activity of collecting reviews from customers or other important KRAs. This exercise can be done for the customer-facing employees who are directly in touch with the customers.
At DCP we have hundreds of customer reviews by simply asking our YouTube subscribers and web development clients to give us a Google Review.
The good Ol’ phone call
This is the oldest trick in the book for collecting feedback and reviews. While you are on call with the client to solve one of the queries regarding the expansion of their project, you can ask them to add a review of your product.
According to B2B sales statistics, 3 out of 4 B2B buyers prefer online video meetings over audio or phone. So, you can also ask for their feedback in such video conferences.
Also, make sure to stay in touch with your top clients so that asking for a review comes naturally and doesn’t seem forced. Reviews from customers are important but reviews from the top profile customers have more weightage.
If you have a script for your customer-facing employees to communicate with your customers, then you can add about collecting reviews in the script as well. You will have to make sure it’s timed correctly.
Get reviews from your email signature
I have a “DCP Google Reviews” link at the bottom that you can see in my email signature above.
Adding a review link to your email signature is a great way to get more reviews on any website that accepts reviews for your business like:
- Google Reviews
- Facebook Reviews
- Linked Reviews
- Trustpilot Review
Wear review badges like a badge of honour
If you are collecting reviews on G2, Capterra, and other reviewing websites, then it only makes sense to showcase the reviews or average star ratings on your website. Such badges are usually linked to the list of customer reviews of your product adds a level of authenticity and authority to your business website.
Moreover, when your visitors read the reviews after clicking on the badge, they start trusting your brand a little more.
Here are a few badges that G2 authorises and allocates to their top performers, industry leaders, or organisations with the highest user adoption. They have many categories for their trust badges.
Such badges are allocated to profiles that are well-maintained and have enough reviews of good quality, apart from their overall performance in the industry.
On our website, we showcase customer testimonials on the home page as shown in the example image below.
collaborate with influencers and experts
Once you’ve achieved a certain number of reviews from your customers, you can then focus on collecting reviews from influencers or experts. One of the ways that have worked for us in collecting reviews from experts is to reach out to them on LinkedIn or Twitter where we ask them to try our products and give us feedback.
It might not work in one go but definitely does.
You can also invest time in creating a personalised pitch where you offer them some incentives for giving a detailed review of your product.
In a world where there are over 525,000 podcast shows live, you can always get in touch with a few podcasters in your industry and ask them to try your products and then review them on their shows. Yes, there are podcasts about software, reviews, best practices, etc. This activity falls under collaborating with influencers which can also be replicated for blogs, videos, etc.
At this point, we are done with the ways of collecting reviews. Now we’ll talk briefly about a few points to keep in mind while and after collecting the reviews.
Because let’s be honest, it’s not about collecting reviews; it’s about building long-term relationships with your customers.
Note: It is also important to showcase your own skills and knowledge, this will help to build your influence and show customers that you are also an expert in your chosen field.
A good way to showcase your knowledge is to write informative blog posts and create lots of video content that can be:
- Uploaded to YouTube
- Uploaded to LinkedIn
- Uploaded to Instagram TV
- Uploaded to Facebook
- Incorporated into your blog posts
At DCP Web Designers we invest our own free time to create a wide range of video tutorials to showcase our knowledge and help others to learn new skills. At present, we have uploaded over 750 video tutorials to our DCP YouTube channel.
We have over 46,000 subscribers and an average of 200,000 views per month.
Be mindful of their time
Leaving a review might not take much time in B2C or online shopping space, but for B2B space, the customers need to spend at least 20-30 mins in leaving a review.
Having reviews that just say ‘good software’ won’t add any value to your brand and it definitely won’t add value for the potential customers.
So, be mindful of the time when asking for a review, especially from the top clients. Asking for a review when they are in a hurry can actually cost you a customer.
So, make sure to pay attention to the ‘when’ while asking for your customers’ feedback or reviews.
Often as a web designer, I will draft a review for my client and send it to them via email, I will ask them to make amendments to the review as required and then post it on Google Reviews. This saves my client’s a lot of time and I often get the review done on the same day.
Always respond to good or bad reviews
Lastly, always, always respond to reviews no matter how bad they are. This will show your customers that you actually care for their reviews or feedback and take them seriously. If there’s a review with critical feedback about a feature or a sub-feature, apart from responding to the review, make sure to add a comment whenever you update your product or solve their issue.
You can also make a habit of sharing such reviews and your response to them on LinkedIn or Twitter to promote a culture of transparency which can encourage other customers to leave their feedback.
Responding to reviews is a review-collecting activity in itself.
Author Bio
Hazel Raoult is a freelance marketing writer and works with PRmention. She has 6+ years of experience in writing about business, entrepreneurship, marketing, and all things SaaS. Hazel loves to split her time between writing, editing, and hanging out with her family.
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Article by Hazel Raoult: DCP Web Designers in London
